Battalion 1

Rhodes stepped into the small white training room—or whatever the hell it was supposed to be.

He made up his mind to think of it as a padded cell where these doctors confined dangerously sick mental patients.

That’s what he was—a dangerously sick mental patient. He really needed to be locked up.

“Don’t say anything,” he snarled under his breath. “Just don’t say a goddamn word. Understand?”

“What if I see something threatening you?” Fisher asked.

“I don’t care. Just keep it to yourself. I’m supposed to train here—not you.”

“I’m supposed to train, too,” Fisher pointed out. “We’re supposed to train together so we can work together.”

“I don’t give a flying crap what we’re supposed to do!” Rhodes snapped. “Just keep quiet and sit there. Don’t do anything. I was fighting in the Legion long before I ever met you, pal. I can handle it on my own.”

“General Brewster won’t like it,” Fisher murmured.

“I hope he doesn’t.” Rhodes shut the training room door behind him. “This bullshit has gone on long enough.”

“What do you want me to do, then?” Fisher asked.

“Make yourself as small as possible so I don’t see you.”

“You mean like this?” Fisher shrank himself to a pinprick in the corner of Rhodes’s vision.

“That’s perfect. Just stay like that—and don’t say anything. Not one peep.”

Fisher didn’t answer.

Rhodes dropped into The Grid and looked around.

After more than forty-eight hours of Fisher’s constant presence and commentary, his absence suddenly unnerved Rhodes. The surroundings didn’t quite look right without Fisher there.

Rhodes shrugged it off, started walking, and then took off at a run. The Grid morphed into a different landscape this time.

He found himself on an alien planet towering with enormous buildings in a style he didn’t recognize. Purple-blue clouds floated in a smoggy sky streaked with long, orange-tinted clouds.

Rocky, iron mountains lined the distant horizon. Forests of what looked like sea kelp floated in the breeze between the mountains and the city crowded with these tall buildings.

Spacecraft hovered overhead and bombarded a pyramid in the distance. More fusion charges erupted from the pyramid, jetted around the countryside, and detonated the buildings.

Lasers scattered from building windows and smashed into the city streets. Rhodes didn’t see right away what anyone was shooting at down there.

He ran faster heading for the pyramid. He didn’t know or think about why, but he wanted to get there.

He could have used his boosters to launch off the ground and fly there faster, but he didn’t want to fly into gunfire from either side. He didn’t even know who was fighting or why—not that it mattered.

He forgot for an instant that this was a made-up simulation inside The Grid. This wasn’t real.

He made it as far as the city outskirts before the ships in the air swiveled in his direction. They opened fire….and then the pyramid and the lasers in the windows did the same thing.

All those weapons aimed straight for him. He had to do something to survive.

Just for a second, he really wished Fisher was here. Rhodes wanted to ask someone for help.

He didn’t have time to say a word before a fusion load from one of the aircraft smashed into the ground next to him.

The impact flung him off his feet. He cartwheeled through the air and saw himself falling toward the ground.

In a fraction of an instant, faster than thought, he changed. He didn’t realize he was doing it until it was already happening.

The green grid lines that covered the landscape covered him, too. He saw them and felt them the same way he saw and felt the grid lines of the landscape. He saw and felt them at the same time that he didn’t see or feel them at all.

They lingered there just beneath the surface—just where he could see them and not see them simultaneously.

He got a hint of that in his own limbs. The Grid was inside him—inside his implants somehow. The lines covered him all over, even the organic skin he still had.

Faster than thought, the grid lines morphed. The squares distorted and his body changed shape along with them.

He slammed into the ground full force and his four limbs distorted into enormous grinding wheels.

His torso changed into a vehicle. His wheels burned along the ground faster than he could run—faster than his boosters would make him fly.

He plowed over miles in a few seconds, smashed into the city streets, and saw for the first time what the spacecraft were shooting at.

Dozens of armored fighter vehicles crowded the streets. They all belonged to two army classes and the two sides plastered each other with different weapons.

He didn’t have time to see who or what they were before he overtook the battle. His scourge guns erupted from his sides. They rotated outward to both sides so they could swivel in all directions without hitting his wheels.

All those vehicles from both sides turned their weapons on him. They fired from everywhere at once. Projectiles, lasers, and fusion blasts pounded his armor, but none of it harmed him.

He picked up speed to ram his way through, but all these vehicles in his path slowed him down. He needed to find another way.

Some forgotten instinct told him to go for the pyramid in the distance. The pyramid controlled all of this. If he could destroy it, he could shut down the whole battle.

He veered around a different building to punch his way through another blockade of vehicles. Their weaponry didn’t damage him.

He extended his Viper missile ports above his back to get the blockade out of his way. At that moment, a spacecraft overhead opened fire and unleashed a hellish volley on the ground.

A deadly fusion shot forked right on top of him and sent him flying. His wheels slammed back down onto the ground still churning up the pavement.

He saw himself hurtling way too fast at a different building. He couldn’t divert in time.

Without thinking, he changed shape again into a different kind of missile. His head elongated into a teardrop point. His arms and legs vanished inside a long, smooth housing.

His boosters fired and flame ejected from his tail mere seconds before he smashed into the building. He sailed out the other side into a hail of gunfire from both the pyramid and the spacecraft.

The spacecraft dropped out of orbit laying down a carpet of gunfire on the city below. The thunder of explosions got louder. Rhodes couldn’t get to the pyramid fast enough.

His grid lines changed again with a single thought. A dozen giant limbs sprouted from his sides. He hit the ground on eight legs, vaulted over the vehicles, landed on another building’s outer wall, and sprang off faster than ever.

He leapt from building to building getting closer to the pyramid. He was almost there.

He hit the last building and blasted off. He changed shape in midair and resumed his real form—if he even had a real form anymore.

He turned back into a man, fired his boosters, soared high over the pyramid, and rotated his thermal cannons downward to shoot directly into the pyramid’s topmost point.

Fisher yelled out in Rhodes’s ear, “Captain—look out!”

At that moment, something fired from the ground at the base of the pyramid. Rhodes had half a second to see some dark openings dotting the pavement around the pyramid’s outer base.

The next instant, a catastrophic explosion went off in Rhodes’s face. A brutal impact hit him in the chest and sent him flying.

He woke up lying in a different capsule. It wasn’t his capsule in the barracks. The lid was closed.

The same prongs attached to his head and body, but he could think and see everything around him. He was back in Dr. Neiland’s lab. She stood outside his capsule talking Dr. Montague.

Rhodes couldn’t hear them through the capsule cover. The readings on all the capsule’s controls flashed across the clear surface in front of him.

Rhodes groaned, but he couldn’t turn over or move in any other way. The prongs held him in place.

They somehow erased any pain, but they didn’t erase the excruciating wrongness of these implants embedded in his flesh.

Fisher was back to his normal size in the corner of Rhodes’s vision. “How do you feel, Captain?” Fisher asked.

Rhodes tried to shut his eyes, but Fisher still didn’t go away even then. Not even turning his head would make Fisher go away.

“I feel rotten if you really want to know the truth,” Rhodes grumbled.

Fisher cocked his head to one side in that birdlike way of his. “I’m not detecting any malfunction or physical pain response.”

“It isn’t a physical pain response, you jackass!” Rhodes snapped and immediately fought himself back under control. “Sorry. I don’t mean to take this out on you. I mean—I do mean to take it out on you, but it isn’t a physical pain response.”

“What is it, then?” Fisher inclined his head the other way. “Is it a mental distress response?”

Rhodes clamped his lips shut. “I guess you could call it that.”

“Ah! I understand now,” Fisher exclaimed. “You’re in distress because you still haven’t oriented to your implants. My programming indicates this is a natural part of the orientation process.”

Rhodes bit his tongue to stop himself from answering. Having Fisher finally understand what the problem was—it almost hurt worse than before.

Rhodes didn’t want Fisher to understand. Rhodes didn’t want anyone to understand.

He didn’t want anyone to find out how hard this was. He didn’t want anyone to know ever under any circumstances. That would make it all too real.

Just then, the prongs retracted from Rhodes’s head and body. They pulled inside the mattress and left him lying there, but the capsule cover didn’t open.

He didn’t move. He didn’t want to get up. He didn’t want to do any of this, but he already knew he had to.

“I would have warned you about those Viper ports near the pyramid, but you told me not to say anything,” Fisher went on. “I really am only trying to help you, Captain. That is my only function.”

Rhodes still didn’t say anything. Something about that last blast must have finally knocked some sense into him.

He didn’t really hold any of this against Fisher. Rhodes almost wished he had Fisher with him during that fight. It would have helped.

Rhodes still doubted how much help Fisher would have been, but at least Rhodes would have had someone.

He didn’t realize this during all his years of fighting in the Legion. He always thought he had his comrades, officers, and fellow soldiers to keep him company.

He did, but it wasn’t the same. None of them could replace one person in his own head who knew everything, saw everything, shared everything—someone whose only function was to make sure he didn’t face this alone.

Now he understood what Fisher had been trying to tell him from the beginning. Fisher might give him information about threats and potential dangers.

That was only a small fraction of Fisher’s true value. His real purpose was to help Rhodes process all of this exactly the way Fisher said.

Rhodes had enough trouble processing all of this—all of this sensory information and sensation bombarding him every second of the day and night.

Just the feeling of these implants invading his body and mind—it was more than he could cope with by himself.

He couldn’t process it. He couldn’t understand it. He couldn’t tolerate it—but he had to. He couldn’t get rid of them.

Fisher might not be able to understand it. Rhodes would never know how much of his own sensations Fisher felt or shared or understood.

For some strange reason, that didn’t seem to matter, either. Fisher didn’t have to understand it. He was just there.

Whatever else he might be—whether he was as alive or as sentient as a human being—that didn’t matter, either. His fate remained irreparably bound to Rhodes’s fate.

Whatever happened to Rhodes would happen to Fisher.

One of these days, Rhodes would go into a real battle with real weapons and real alien enemies.

Then he would need every ally he could get to cope with the danger. He would need one person—just one—one person he knew for certain cared as much about saving Rhodes’s ass as he cared about saving it himself.

Who else would that be besides Fisher? How much closer could anyone get than riding around Rhodes’s own head?

Whatever Fisher might be, Rhodes couldn’t hate him anymore. Rhodes had enough problems without that.

End of Chapter 7.